Nikon View: could it get any worse? A crash test review of View NX2.

UPDATE (10-08-14): NewCapture NX-D, a piece of Nikon software that I’m actually exited about. It is fairly fast, works well and beats ACR hands down. Best of all: it’s free!UPDATE (12-03-2012) It seems that the latest updates solve most of the mentioned problems. If you have not done so already, I'd strongly suggest updating to 2.3.0 (article here)UPDATE (15-12-2010): I followed the suggestion of one of our visitors and updated my display drivers. NX2 now runs without the most annoying glitches I mention in this article, but still responds sluggish and is considerably slower than its predecessors. If you have not updated your display drivers lately, my suggestion would be doing so before installing NX2.

I thought it could not get any worse after testing Capture NX2 and View NX1.5 - a while ago - but I was wrong.NX2 is a major problem, at least from where I am standing. So much so, that I have not been able to thoroughly test it; not on Windows XP Pro x64 SP2 (Intel Core Duo 1.6 Ghz., 1 Tb. RAID 10, 4 Gb. RAM, GeForce 7300 GS/256) nor on a “normal” XP Pro SP3 32-bits system.Do Nikon beta-test any of their programs at all, or do they just throw us to the lions? Worse yet: do they even care about us entrusting our precious images to their cripple-ware?

Add program - dialogue window freeze

Cut-off Edit Menu

Weird colors in Windows x64, akin v.1.5.x

It does not run or crawl. Heck, I’m lucky if it even creeps...

• At first run the program showed a “processing” message, but nothing was actually processing. Clicking on anything made it crash (on both test systems).• The “Add” button in the “Options Menu” >> “Open with Application” is unresponsive. When the dialogue pop-up finally does open, it is (Not responding) and it is impossible to browse/scroll the available applications; generally, the program freezes.• The Edit menu is cut off at first launch and you have to manually enlarge it. Still, on the next launch it is cut off again, while most editing operations take ages to previsualize.• On x64 the colors become really weird (primary magenta's, reds, greens and yellows) with certain editing operations, like Brightness adjustment or D-Lighting HS, for example.I changed the color profile of the program from ProPhoto to Nikon sRGB, to see if that solved the problem (like it does in NX 1.5 - see this article), to no avail.• Menu actions makes the menu bar and program icon go blank and show a (Not Responding) message. The latter disappears after a while, but the program does not DO anything.• If any menu or dialogue window finally opens, and IF is the operating word here, the scroll-bars are sluggish or do not respond, and again, the menu bars go blank (Not Responding).• Especially on Win-32 it keeps freezing (temporarily) or crashing. This is particularly curious because it is not supposed to run on x64, but there it crashes a lot less.• Scroll-bars will not scroll, sliders will not slide – at least not in a manner one would expect.• The Picture Control “Launch Utility” button does not launch anything.• It appears that the program does not like multi-tasking, because every time I launched another program, View NX2 froze.

Mapwindow with thumbnail pop-up

Mapwindow with meta-data pop-up

The only thing I like about you is your girlfriend.

The one and only thing cool about View NX2 is the geo-tagging option with Google Maps integration, which is also the only part of the interface that seems to work as expected.And when I say cool, I mean really COOL! This is the very best gps/map integration I have seen yet, with a smooth, slick interface and the automatic location of any geo-tagged image in the current view.View options include Map, Satellite, Hybrid (map + satellite), Google Earth and Open in (Internet) Browser.There are path views (the route taken when shooting) and location pins which – when clicked – produce nice pop-ups with thumbnail and meta-data tabs.There is also a search option to find locations or fill in missing geo-data.Thus, the only thing nice about Nikon View NX2 is not “by Nikon”, but “by Google”.

Conclusion.It was impossible to properly test Nikon View NX2, because it either runs sluggish, freezes or crashes.Since I was not too crazy about View NX 1.5 either, I have rolled back (again) on View 6 on my 32-bit Winbox. Unfortunately, View 6 is not Win x64 compatible (believe me, I’ve tried), which is why Windows 64-bits users (XP Pro, Vista, Windows 7) should either try their luck with View NX2 or are stuck with NX 1.5. Thank heavens I have long replaced it by Adobe Bridge & ACR.That said, I will definitely keep NX2 on the x64 system for geo-tagging purposes, because the Google-Nikon interface is hard to beat – for the moment.Nikon should already fire the idiot that has been doing their crippled, bullshit software for the last half decade, and hire Google instead.Maybe then there is a spark of hope that they might finally get it right...

Note: it is possible that this program works just Hunky Dory for you.If so, I’m glad. Please leave a comment to prove me wrong; being a fellow Nikonian, you can imagine that there are very few things that would make me happier.

12 comments

Another problem is in the full view mode. Out of trying to view 88 images as I scrol through them with the arrows on the bottom when I get to about image 44 the screen goes black. there is no way to get it back except to close out of the program and come back. Full screen is useless on 2 computers running XP.

I installed View NX2 about 5 days ago. Ran fine until today. When I went to open it, it crashed imediately. This same thing happened with NX 1.5 sometimes. From experience I uninstalled it and installed again. Works now for the time being. Nikon can make cameras do just about everything, but can’t get their programs designed right. I do like to use View NX for sorting images and converting RAW files directly to Tiff when it looks pretty good out of the camera.

WOW! I’m Floored! View NX shares the same RAW Processing Engine as Capture NX2 which is hands down the best Nikon RAW converter. I was skeptical of ViewNX2 at first, after “discovering” NX2 as a result of inconsistent results with ACR. So I tried 1.5, and low and behold, within 15 minutes I was flying with TRUE colors. The Multi-Monitor Support has cut 90% of my editing time. Even when away from the Studio with my laptop it’s still quite fast to view images full screen and is my first step in my workflow. When you get home from an event, and have 1700 images to go through, yeah, it matters. Couple that with the best Nikon RAW conversion and the incredibly low price (free), it’s a winner in my book.

OK. Stabs at this program hint towards some supposed “bugginess". If there was a discernible difference in speed between Lightroom 3.2 and this, I might consider otherwise. However, I cannot report this. Save the $300 you’d spend on Lightroom and just try this. Unless you REALLY like the interface or just are ashamed to use freeware.

My problem with ViewNX2 is in NEF, 12-bit RAW, processing. It took very long time to save and to convert. Sometimes, it spent more than 10 minutes on one file and the original file size will increase two fold, 12MB to 24MB. Please let me know if you have the same experience.

I’ve had no problems with View NX 1.5 so far and have used it since I bought my D5000 in Dec. 09. When I DL’d View NX2 a couple of weeks ago I initially liked the new info window to the right and the ability to separate the histo. into R, G, B, and brightness. until today I’ve had no problem on my Vista 32 machine. But it crashed twice today as I was trying to print some shots. Not good.
I’ve just upgraded my laptop to Win7, and because it went from XP, I had to do a clean install. So I had to reinstall my programs and loaded NX2. Haven’t used it yet, but if I have problems I’ll let you know.

I agree that the geotagging function is really cool. I’ve only been using this for a day or so but I have not figured out how to share with other my geotag map. It is a Google map so it should be possible. Any hints?